Chuck D Defends Jeopardy! Contestant Who Confused Public Enemy With Marky Mark And The Funky Bunch
Few things in this life are certain, but Jeopardy! contestants will almost always get music-related clues hilariously wrong. The most recent offender was contestant Halley Ryherd, who won last night’s episode but who also bricked one music question in spectacular fashion. The category “Chuck D, Times 3” was mostly built around questions related to Charleses Dickens and Darwin, but there was also one clue about the other Chuck D: “In the 1980s Chuck D began fighting the power in this hip-hop group with Flava Flav, a man who always knew what time it was.”
Ryherd’s response: “What is the Funky Bunch?”
The Funky Bunch were, of course, the early-’90s pop-rap crew led by the man now known as Mark Wahlberg. The Funky Bunch managed a chart-topping hit, which is something that Public Enemy never even came close to doing, but they never fought any sort of power, and they never had members named Chuck D or Flava Flav. (They did, however, have a member named Hector The Booty Inspector, which could make a great Jeopardy! clue one day.) Ryherd has already tweeted about her embarrassment.
The actual Chuck D, on the other hand, has defended Ryherd on Twitter, using the bulletproof reasoning that people get things wrong sometimes: “Everybody don’t know everything… it’s why I introduce myself wherever I go and whoever I talk to … it’s just courtesy.”
In any case, here’s Flavor Flav performing with Marky Mark’s brother Donnie Wahlberg and his group New Kids On The Block at the 1991 American Music Awards.
Maybe that’s what Halley Ryherd was thinking of.
